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WIECKING: Good morning. Thank you for your time on this. We could have picked <br />many other locations on the HPA campus that would have been more central, but one of the <br />reasons that we picked this location was its proximity to the prevailing winds, which average <br />about 22 miles per hour in that location. Our goal is, going back a few years, to make HPA <br />completely energy self-sufficient within the next five years, which is a very ambitious goal. <br />And in order to do that, what we have to do is we have to set up a station or an energy lab to <br />study the energy uses on campus, which is really one of our main goals. We have three main <br />goals: One is education for the students – of course, that’s our mission – the second is to study <br />the energy uses on campus so that we can make ourselves energy self-sufficient, and the third is <br />an outreach to the community. So this will be a model, not just for how to do this in an <br />education setting but if you were to put up any sort of enterprise, a college, a school, a business, <br />how could you make it completely energy neutral? And this is going to be using the latest in <br />the alternate energy and energy conserving technologies; it’s going to be -, the LEED <br />certification of this building will exceed that of the Gateway Center down in Kona at the <br />Lanihau site, using the latest in the developments and conservation but also in production of <br />energy on site. The faculty housing that we are planning ultimately will incorporate what we <br />learn from this energy lab, as well all of the other expansions that we do on the K-through-8 <br />integration of the campus. So the slide that you saw earlier, it looks like this is sort of out in <br />the boonies but what we are ultimately hoping is this will be part of a triangle where we have <br />the K-through-8 campus, the 9-though-12 campus and this building will be the central piece in <br />that. <br />The outreach aspect is very critical to us because it has exposure to sunlight from the south <br />with no impinging trees, which is very important for this; it has clear access to the wind to the <br />northeast from the trades, and it also has access to the hills above if we decide to put an <br />underground or submerged water tank for storage of the energy because one of the bad things <br />about storing energy these days is if you use lead batteries, there is an environmental impact on <br />landfills. We want to make sure that we are modeling best practices with this energy lab <br />educationally and environmentally and on an energy standpoint. So one of the things that we <br />hope to incorporate in this, ultimately to become energy self-sufficient is on days when it’s not <br />windy, we would like to have some banked energy in the form of pumped-storage hydro – <br />water pumped up filled to an underground tank, which you could then use to power the entire <br />campus. <br />To give you a sense of perspective, our electric bill at HPA before the recent hike is $36,000 <br />per month; this is a huge chunk of money that we could be using elsewhere – let me just put it <br />that way. This could be student tuitions; we already have a tremendous outreach aspect to <br />incorporate students from the community or from the Islands, this money could be used to <br />further that. And that’s what we are hoping to do as well as reducing our energy expenditures. <br />That $36,000 a month was based on the HELCO bid for fuel at $60 a barrel, which you know <br />hit $149 a barrel a few days ago before it went down recently. We anticipate that the energy <br />prices on the Big Island will probably continue to increase, and what we are hoping – we didn’t <br />know this at the time, so we sound like really smart, but when we started this, energy was not <br />this expensive – but what we are hoping is that this can become a model for future energy <br />projects in the Big Island, and make the Big Island a go-to place in the world for sustainable <br />energy – a place that companies would want to send their turbines and solar panels to be <br />EXHIBIT A <br />5 <br /> <br />